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Colophon, 2017

Individual posts are edited in Markdown
format, using the MacDown editor on a
Macintosh. They
are translated to HTML via a shell script that does some
reformatting and vets the output using Tidy. Images are edited,
when necessary, using Acorn and NetPBM. Autodesk Graphic is used for
vector graphics.

Most of the not-quite dynamic sidebar content is
produced by really small Python scripts running from cron,
generating tiny HTML fragments that are transcluded into the pages
at rendertime. This allows the flexibility of dynamic page
generation with the benefits of static performance. More discussion
of this technique
here.

Wed, 22 Nov 2017

Airpods Are Awesome (With a Couple of Caveats)

I’m often an early adopter when it comes to
Apple gear. I picked up my Apple Watch, iPad, and a few other
things on launch day. When Apple introduced Airpods in 2016,
though, I held back a while, for a few reasons.

I’m not a huge fan of earbuds. I think I’ve got slightly
funny-shaped ear canals, so they never quite feel right in my ears
(i.e. they always feel like they’re on the verge of falling
out)

Though I’m by no means an audiophile, I’m not a big fan of
open-ear headphones. They don’t really isolate you much from
outside sound (which has its pros and cons, more on this later),
and... I like bass.

At $159, they’re not an impulse buy. The only time I’ve ever
spent more than $75 on a pair of earphones was for a pair of
Sony studio
monitors (which were totally worth it, BTW.) These are also
tiny, which potentially translates to “easy to lose.”

Bluetooth largely sucks (but Apple seems to have eliminated
most of the pain points -- see below.)

They were a 1.0 product with a lot of unproven tech.

Let me get the other disclaimers (the caveats mentioned in my
title) out of the way first. If you’re not completely inside the
Apple ecosystem, these are probably not for you. Like a lot of
Apple products, a lot of their virtues come from their integration
with the rest of the ecosystem. If you’re an Android person with a
Windows or Linux laptop, keep looking.

If you primarily buy earphones/headphones for audio quality,
keep looking. These are (quite) decent as far as earbuds go, but
they’ll never sound as good as a set of high-end closed-ear
phones.

That said, I finally found a use case that justified picking
them up. We live in an open plan house, and I like watching TV at
night (really, it’s the only chance I get.) I’ve tried other
solutions for balancing the TV volume, but generally speaking I’m
either in a situation when I can’t hear programming well enough to
enjoy it, or I’m annoying others in the house. The killer
feature for Airpods, for me, is that I could pair them at the
iCloud account level. This means that after pairing them once on my
iPhone, they automagically became accessible from my Apple Watch,
my iPad, my MacBook, and, most importantly, my Apple TV.
Plop them in your ears, then hold down the play/pause button until
the audio output device selector pops up. There is no step
3.

I use them sometimes from my phone (mostly when grocery
shopping), but where they’re most useful is at the office (paired
to my MacBook Pro) and on the aforementioned Apple TV. Since
they’re not completely audio-isolating, they work well in an office
where people may actually have need to get your attention, and
since you’re sitting down, you’re not really worried about them
falling out. They also work surprisingly well for conference
calls.

I haven’t even gotten into how clever the charging case is, or
how slick and painless it is moving them between your various
devices, or how much better the AAC compression sounds than
A2DP.

Thu, 06 May 2010

The iPad As A Book Reader

This is fifth in an indeterminate series of posts about my
experiences with the iPad I bought on 2010-Apr-12.

It’s still very early.

As it stands now, Apple launched their iBook reader and the
iBooks store simultaneously with the iPad. Amazon’s Kindle reader
app showed up a few days later, as did more specialized readers
like GoodReader, InstapaperPro, Marvel Comics, and Zinio.

I’ll concentrate on iBooks, since that’s the experience Apple is
leading with. The first release is actually pretty functional, at
least for reading fiction and light nonfiction. I don’t really know
how it stands up as a reader for technical documents or more
specialized fare. My first iBooks purchase was William Gibson’s
Neuromancer, which seemed somehow appropriate — it
struck a good balance by being a book I’m pretty familiar with, but
at the same time it had prabably been 20 years since I’d last read
it.

iBooks: the Good

As you would expect, there’s a lot of polish in the iBooks
interface for common tasks like navigating within books, setting
bookmarks, and searching. The controls are evident and
discoverable, without the “747 cockpit” too-many-widgets problems
of a lot of other reading tools. The “real book” accents (like the
visual page illusion and the fake inside-cover you see when reading
a page) are visually appealing without being overdone.

Despite the cries of “lock in” predictably hurled at Apple from
the usual corners, it’s pretty trivial to get books for iBooks from
sources other than the iBookstore. Just as iTunes and the iPod
family support MP3 files from wherever you
buy/find/borrow/steal/convert them, any book you can get into an
unencumbered ePub file will be cheerfully synced by iTunes once
you’ve added it to your library. It’s pretty simple to run pretty
much any non-DRMed book in the most common formats through a tool
like Calibre or Stanza Desktop to create an
.epub file that’s readable in iBooks. As with MP3 files you find on
the web, you can make the resulting book as nice as you want,
provided you’re willing to put a little effort into metadata
grooming.

There is a lot of backlight control in the iBooks application.
It’s very easy to make the screen equally readable in a
brightly-lit room or in a completely dark one.

I may have read on a spec sheet once that the iPad gets less
battery life than a Kindle between charges, but I’ve yet to run my
battery all the way down in a single day doing anything on the
device, even performing far more CPU-intensive tasks than book
reading, so, um, I haven’t found cause to care.

iBooks: the Bad

The biggest problem I’ve noticed, at least with reading, is the
the insistence on full justification without hyphenation. It
simply makes text harder to read. I can understand that
good hyphenation is nontrivial to support, but until we
get it couldn’t we at least have the option to display text
ragged-right?

Despite all the scare stories from E-Ink partisans about how
reading on a backlit screen would make our eyes bleed (conveniently
neglecting that most office workers spend several hours a day
reading on, um, backlit screens), the real visibility problem I’ve
hit with the iPad is reflective glare off the shiny screen when
reading in direct sunlight. Like the iPhone screen before it, the
iPad screen is pretty much a mirror, so don’t expect to get a lot
of beach reading done unless you take an umbrella.

The iPad weighs a lot more than the “pure” e-readers (Kindle,
Nook, etc.) If you do a lot of reading in bed, you may find
yourself switching the iPad from hand-to-hand a fair bit as your
wrists become fatigued.

Diversion — an important clarification re: copying text from
iBooks.

But there are worse things than paywalls. Take a look at this
screen. This, as you all probably know, is Apple’s new iBook
application for the iPad. What I’ve done here is shown you what
happens when you try to copy a paragraph of text. You get the
familiar iPhone-style clipping handles, and you get two options
“Highlight” and “Bookmark.” But you can’t actually copy the text,
to paste it into your own private commonplace book, or email it to
a friend, or blog about it. And of course there’s no way to link to
it. What’s worse: the book in question is Penguin’s edition of
Darwin’s Descent of Man, which is in the public domain. Those are
our words on that screen. We have a right to them.

The important bit in
that paragraph are the words “Penguin’s edition.” I haven’t
downloaded “Penguin’s edition” of the Descent of Man
because it’s $12.99 and the Project Gutenberg
edition, which is returned by the same search query in iBooks,
is free. What I can confirm is that I am able to highlight and copy
text from the exact same passage in the Project Gutenberg edition
of the book.

I am not arguing that a publisher flipping the “copy inhibit”
bit in an eBook isn’t lame — it is. What I am pointing out is that
the symptom pointed out by Johnson is under the control of the
eBook publisher. It isn’t an Apple mandate, and it’s not some
inherent failure of the iBooks platform (nor an Insidious Apple
Plot To Lock Up Culture.)

Mon, 26 Apr 2010

This is fourth in an indeterminate series of posts about my
experiences with the iPad I bought on 2010-Apr-12. I originally
planned to post this last Friday, but, um, whatevs…

The iPad’s built-in applications are a bit of a mixed bag.
A few of them benefit massively from the increased screen real
estate and speed (Safari, Mail, Maps), but don’t really add a
lot of functionlity over their iPhone equivalents. In a lot of
cases it begins to feel like the applications are just being
allowed to exist at the sizes they always wanted to be, if that
makes sense. Others (e.g. Notes) feel like a bit of a missed
opportunity.

Safari is, in many ways, the most important application on the
iPad. Just by being a fast as hell browser you hold in your hands
and interact with gesturally, it may be all some folks need to
justify the iPad. As I mentioned in a previous post, it handily
whips Chrome and Firefox on an Ubuntu netbook, both in page
rendering speed and pure joy of use — desktop browsers on
small screens are seriously compromised applications, being
designed, really, for a very different form factor. There are some
small but notable improvements over the iPhone’s Mobile
Safari as well. The most immediately noticeable is that videos
(both native mpeg4 and embedded YouTube, at least… not yet
sure about other h.264-friendly sites yet) are displayed inline,
instead of forcing a trip to the video player. There’s also
an (optional) bookmarks bar. I even have some of my favorite
bookmarklets (or at least the ones that make sense there, like
Readability and TBuzz) there. It doesn’t do Flash, but if you
care about that you’re probably not reading this post.

It’s hard to tell if Mail on iPad is rewritten from
scratch or if only the interface has been redone. Like Mail on the
iPhone, it lacks a unified Inbox, but switching between accounts is
so fast I don’t really mind. It’s pretty easy to plow
through emails on the device. You’re not going to type epics
on the onscreen keyboard, but reading emails is almost unreasonably
pleasant.

Worthy of note is the iPod application. Aside from the
not really portable thing, it’s easily the most visually
yummy presentation I’ve ever seen in a music playing
application. The screen size allows displaying CD inserts at full
size (assuming you’ve embedded suitably large cover art in
your metadata), and it’s really striking with a pretty album
cover. The onscreen widgets are all consciously finger sized,
including the volume slider. It’s all very tactile.

The Maps application is functionally pretty much identical to
the iPhone version, but being bigger makes it prettier.
That’s pretty much enough for now.

Notepad is pretty pointless. The only difference is the larger
screen size. It brings nothing new in terms of syncing or easy
exporting of notes. Meh. Even something as simple as being able to use
Bluetooth file sending would help matters. It still insists on
Marker Felt.

The Photo viewing app is gorgeous, but it’s not the
easiest thing in the world to find the one photo you’re
looking for among thousands. For some unfathomable reason, it
doesn’t support iPhoto keywords. As an adjunct, you can turn
the iPad into a really expensive digital photo frame from the lock
screen. It’s also got that “cool to demo, but kind
useless”-feature of being able to click on an album and
pinch-zoom on a bunch of pics at once. It’s worth noting that
the first time you sync photos from your computer to the iPad,
it’ll spend hours “optimizing” them. This is
irritating when you have a new gadget you just want to play around
with. I recommend aborting the process and deferring it until
overnight.

The iTunes Store and the App Store are pretty much exactly what
you’d expect, nothing more, nothing less. The YouTube app is
presentable, and pulls off the admirable trick of allowing you
access to the worst comments on the
Internet without shoving your face in them.

I suppose I could treat iBooks as a built-in application, seeing
as how you’re prompted to download it from the App Store the
first time you go there, but I suppose it’ll get a separate
post all its own anyway.

Wed, 21 Apr 2010

iPad Hardware Impressions

This is third in an indeterminate series of posts about my
experiences with the iPad I bought on 2010-Apr-12.

There were a lot of fanciful hardware designs being bandied
about by people before the launch of the iPad. There were things
that had all sorts of ports, buttons, and frippery, obviously
coming from people how haven’t been paying attention to the
ruthlessly minimal designs coming from Apple for years.

I didn’t really pay any attention to them, because I knew
that externally, anything they shipped would be a moderately sized
piece of aluminum and glass wrapped around some very understated
functional engineering. It would be something with no fans, no
battery covers, and the bare minimum of external controls and
ports.

In retrospect, the
idea of scaling up the iPhone/iPod touch form was the most logical
thing they could have done. This device isn’t being aimed at
the neckbeards on Engadget whipping out their spec sheets and
measuring units, it’s a device aimed quite specifically at
the tens of millions of people whose first experience with Apple
was the iPod and/or iPhone. The end result is a device that has a
very small number of external controls and interfaces that will
feel completely familiar to lots of people. It’s the gadget
equivalent of printing “Don’t Panic” across the
front in large,
friendly letters. It so happens that the chosen form factor is
very comfortable for sitting on a couch or an easy chair. There was
some grousing that they went with a 4:3 aspect ratio instead of
16:9, but 4:3 makes a lot more sense if you expect that the device
is going to spend as much time oriented vertically as
horizontally.

After a week of carrying an iPad around in various contexts,
I’m very pleased with the form factor. It is a very
comfortable thing to carry. The weight, which is somewhat
greater than I’d expected, gives the thing a reassuring
feeling of solidity. I know, intellectually, that a great part of
the weight is the fairly massive battery assembly, but it really
gives the impression of being a solid block of aluminum in the
hand. As you would expect from an Apple device, the whole thing
feels very constructed: there arent any gaps or seams, and
there is no “flex” when you grasp the opposite corners
in your hands and apply slight twisting pressure. The weight
isn’t all good, though. When reading in bed, it’s
definitely noticeable if you’re trying to hold the device in
one hand. One and a half pounds may not sound like much, but when
you’re lying on your back supporting it at eye level,
it’s quite noticeably heavier than you’d probably
like.

As I
stated earlier, it never warms to the touch, even when playing
video. There’s some serious hardware witchcraft in this
little slab.

All of my performance remarks are subjective. I have an iPhone
3G, and the iPad is dramatically faster in all aspects than the
phone. Switching between screens on the Springboard has no delay at
all. As stated earlier, the browser is desktop-fast. I don’t
know how much of this can be ascribed to the A4 chip, the video
hardware, or low-level OS tweaks, but the performance is really
quite remarkable.

The multitouch screen is very responsive, of course. I’ll
come back to this in a later post, but the iPhoneOS UI really comes
into its own when paired with an extra large control surface. There
are all sorts of interface niceties that work better on the iPad
than on the iPhone, simply because there’s so much more
screen and control surface area to work with. The battery life and
charging experience is worth a whole post on its own. Suffice to
say, being able to get 10+ hours on a charge, even under intensive
use, is a huge win.

One minor complaint I have about the form factor is, since the
device is perfectly happy to work in any of the 4 possible
orientations, it’s very easy to lose track of where the
external controls are. I often find myself reaching for the
rotation lock or volume controls, only to find they’re on a
different edge of the iPad than I thought.

This is first in an indeterminate series of posts
about my experiences with the iPad I bought on
2010-Apr-12.

I got the 32GB WiFi model.

I tried to resist, honestly. Come on, laugh at the early
adopter.

The itch became unbearable the weekend following the big launch.
I started calling the local Apple stores (there are 4 in the
Greater Detroit area) and all of them were completely sold out on
Sunday (4/11). I called again at lunchtime the following Monday,
and the Troy
store (~10 minutes from the office) had the 32 and 64 GB
models.

I had quite a few people ask me how I liked it when I first
bought it, and I pretty much said exactly the same thing to
everyone: I’ve only used it a few hours; ask me again after
I’ve used it for a week.

So it’s been a week, and I figured that this was as good
an opportunity as any to brush the cobwebs off my poor, neglected
weblog. My plan as of now is to break this into a series of smaller
posts that will run 1-2 per day until I’m tired of hearing
myself blab. I’m projecting about a half-dozen moderate
length posts, as of now.

I’m not claiming I have any unique insights, but
I’ll offer the perspective of someone who already owns a
bucketload of Apple gear and a netbook. Since one of the
big debates among the dorkerati was whether the iPad is more or
less useful than a netbook, I’ll talk about things from that
direction, too.

This is second in an indeterminate series of posts
about my experiences with the iPad I bought on
2010-Apr-12.

One mistake the Slashdot/Engadget/Digg crowds always make is
assuming that their harware use cases are universal: “It
won’t play my 2 terabytes of Ogg Vorbis files stored on an
NFS server. I can’t self-host the entire GNU toolchain,
therefore it’s useless…” I will try to avoid that
here.

I’ve
written in this space before about our Acer Aspire netbook.
It’s basically the third computer in the house — where
I use my desktop (a G5 tower) and my office laptop (a 13-inch
MacBook) as machines to “get things done”, the
Ubuntu-based netbook has pretty much functioned for a small set of
tasks:

A smart terminal for logging into the other machines to compile
code, move files around the network, mess around with the home
router, etc.)

A really portable machine for times when hauling around even my
7-pound Macbook and accessories feels like overkill. (I took it on
our December cruise, for example, and I take it to neighborhood
coffee shops sometimes)

A small (but still bigger than a smartphone) media player

I will now say, that for the way that I have used a
netbook, the iPad is in most respects a (much) superior
platform.

As it stands, the iPad is one of the most pleasing web-browsing
experiences available right now. The installed build of Mobile
Safari is almost unreasonably fast, on a device that, as I read
specs, sports a single 1GHz RISC core. I haven’t benchmarked
it, but what’s important is that it feels fast.
Pages pop, the rendering and reflow feels close to
instant, subjectively faster than my desktop G5 and on par with my
MacBook. It is far faster than a current Chrome build on
the Atom-powered Acer netbook. It’s not just the speed,
though. There is something very natural about browsing the web on a
magazine-sized device propped against your leg in an easy chair.
Mobile Safari very wisely stays out of the way, with minimal
browser chrome and widgets in your face. All the pinch and zoom and
double-tap to resize DIV stuff you’re probably familiar with
from the iPhone platform is still there, but with a 4x larger
browsing surface it really feels like no-compromise web browsing.
You’ve still got the “gravitational” fingertip
scrolling that’s so pleasant on the iPhone, too. Speaking for
myself, the absence of Flash is a feature, not a bug.

As a terminal for interacting with other devices, the netbook
wins because of its full (cramped) keyboard. That said, for
the types of device access I tend to do on weekends (e.g. changing
router settings, etc.) the win isn’t a huge one.

The iPad is far more
usably portable than a netbook. It gets far better battery
life (10+ hours vs. 3), is absolutely cool to the touch (the
netbook gets very warm in the lap), occupies less space
(no pop up screen) in use, and has no fans.

The netbook plays (theoretically) more media formats, but with
Handbrake and Air Video,
getting any format to the iPad has become pretty trivial. The
netbook struggles mightily with fullscreen h.264, as well. As a
fairly frequent business traveler, I’m looking forward to
taking the iPad on long flights. Everything I’ve heard
suggests that getting 4 full-length films on a single battery
charge is not unreasonable.

It’s true that the iPad is currently more expensive than
most netbook-class machines, but not unreasonably so.

Mon, 12 Jan 2009

Anyone Have a PoGo?

Anyone have one of those little Polaroid PoGos? I wouldn't
be expecting huge things from the quality, but a little photo
printer that would literally fit in the side pocket of my camera
bag does have appeal on its own.

Fri, 25 Jul 2008

iPhone Free Software Ringtone

If you’re a free software kinda person who feels guilty about your
heresy/iPhone
purchase, you can always try to ease your karmic burden by rocking
the Free
Software Song as a ringtone
(128k, no copyrights claimed.)

Tue, 22 Jul 2008

Playing Quicktime High Def Trailers on the PS3

Putting this here for Google's sake -- the information is out there, but scattered...

You can play the High Definition videos from Apple's Quicktime Trailer site on your PS3 (maybe the Xbox 360 as well -- I don't have one to test.) This is nice, as Apple's trailer site has about 10x as many trailers available compared to the PSN store. The HD videos are internally MPEG4 conformant h.264 video and AAC audio. I believe Quicktime Pro is also required. In theory this should work in either OS X or Windows, but I only have OS X to try.

Click one of the links (depending on your TV's resolution, of course) and the trailer will load in QuickTime Player. Depending on download size, it will take anywhere from a couple of seconds to an eternity for the movie to finish downloading. I recommend allowing the trailer to download fully before trying to export it.

Make sure you set the viewing window to "Actual Size" -- as far as I can tell, QuickTime wants to export the movie at the same resolution as the current window.

Choose the "Export" option in QuickTime Player's file menu.

In the resulting dialog, choose to export the movie with both audio and video set to "passthrough."

Move the resultant MP4 file to your console via network, using something like MediaLink or MediaTomb, or via a thumb drive.

Sat, 19 Jul 2008

This Week In Noxious Gadgetry (Teh Internets in Yr. Pants edition)

I’ve owned an iPod touch since the
beginning of the year and it’s a pretty cool device— it
does the expected iPod stuff with a very nice screen for video and
the bonus of being a WiFi enabled handheld web browser. I also, for
work, carry the
world’s worst mobile phone. That’s actually
probably a little unfair— it’s probably not so much
worse than all the other shitty little phones billions of people
carry around, but I do hate the thing — horrible UI, poor
battery life, impossible to find accessories (sync cables,
chargers) for, etc.

Back to positive things, as mentioned above, I really do like
the iPod touch, particularly the net-enabledness of it. As
ubiquitous as WiFi is, though, finding a quality clear and open
connection when I’m out and about is always a bit of a
crapshoot. Watching the prerelease hype for the 3g iPhone, I
finally decided that what I really wanted was an iPod touch that
had an always-on connection. A few months back I looked into
getting something like the CradlePoint
PHS300, but quickly realized that then I’d be carrying 3
little devices around all the time, and that’s just
silly.

So, I, um, bought an iPhone (Tammie did,
too.) We hit the sweet spot in terms of availibility — we
purchased at the Somerset Apple store on
Saturday. This meant that the Friday launch day activation disaster
had been resolved (a friend and I talked to a guy Friday who spent
6 hours waiting for a phone), but there were still actually phones
available (most stores sold out on Sunday.) We got in line @ 2:30
PM and were inside the store at 4:00. We walked out with two
working phones a half hour later.

Sat, 12 Jul 2008

Sun, 18 May 2008

The Only Thing On The Internet Stupider Than Youtube Comments

It’s been a few years since I’ve really paid much attention to gaming consoles. Since I own one again I’m trying to pay at least moderate attention to the various gaming sites so I know what’s coming out and when, how to spool content from my computers to it, etc. One thing I’ve (blissfully) forgotten in the interval is how obnoxiously stupid console fanboys are. Every time I follow a link to an article about a title or accessory or feature I’m interested in, I make the mistake of reading past the end of the article and I see the comments posted by the various mental giants who’ve invested their entire self worth on which small television-attached beeping box sells the most units. It’s almost as bad as adults who hold a grudge against other cities because the hired-gun millionaires that run around in the stadiums and arenas in their town won or lost versus the hired-gun millionaires that run around in someone else’s.

Mon, 27 Nov 2006

Handheld Feed Reading

Adding to the
list of things
that work really well in the Sony PSP’s web browser would
be
Google Reader’s newish mobile mode. Well, it’s not
actually new (you’ll note that link goes back to,
um, May) but I kept hearing people talk about it as “Google
Reader’s mobile phone mode” or something, and you know
I hate me some phone surfing. I was pleasantly surprised to find it
works really well in the PSP’s browser (as does the latest
revision of Flickr’s
mobile interface).

I tried them both out while resting upon my turkey-enhanced butt
over the weekend.

Fri, 29 Jul 2005

Wed, 27 Jul 2005

PSP 2.0 Browser Firmware

Yeah, I know, I should have stuck to the 1.5 firmware for teh h0mebr3w, but that ship sailed a long time ago.

It’s still not at the official site, nor via wireless update as of this writing (Wed Jul 27 09:28:18 EDT 2005), but I found it here. That link also lists all the features that are supposed to be in the update.

The browser string for the new Sony PSP Web Browser is “Mozilla/4.0 (PSP (PlayStation Portable); 2.00)”, in case you want to try serving special content for it. It really cries out for something like this — the first vendor to release one of these that works with the PSP gets my money (I hate hate hate mobile phone-style tappitytappitytap-style press-the-number-key-12-times alphanumeric input)

I tried to take some photos of the unit with 2.0 firmware installed but I’m having fantastically bad results no matter what I try. The combination of a shiny black PSP and a bright screen is completely confusing my camera, which can’t manage to focus.

I’m still trying to figure out the new video format stuff. If nothing else, H.264 should allow me to squeeze more video onto a memory stick.